About Me

Known principally for his weekly political columns and his commentaries on radio and television, Chris Trotter has spent most of his adult life either engaging in or writing about politics. He was the founding editor of The New Zealand Political Review (1992-2005) and in 2007 authored No Left Turn, a political history of New Zealand. Living in Auckland with his wife and daughter, Chris describes himself as an “Old New Zealander” – i.e. someone who remembers what the country was like before Rogernomics. He has created this blog as an archive for his published work and an outlet for his more elegiac musings. It takes its name from Bowalley Road, which runs past the North Otago farm where he spent the first nine years of his life. Enjoy.

Bowalley Road Rules

The blogosphere tends to be a very noisy, and all-too-often a very abusive, place. I intend Bowalley Road to be a much quieter, and certainly a more respectful, place.
So, if you wish your comments to survive the moderation process, you will have to follow the Bowalley Road Rules.
These are based on two very simple principles:
Courtesy and Respect.
Comments which are defamatory, vituperative, snide or hurtful will be removed, and the commentators responsible permanently banned.
Comments which are thoughtful, witty, creative and stimulating will be most welcome, becoming a permanent part of the Bowalley Road discourse.
However, I do add this warning. If the blog seems in danger of being over-run by the usual far-Right suspects, I reserve the right to simply disable the Comments function, and will keep it that way until the perpetrators find somewhere more appropriate to vent their collective spleen.

Followers

Wednesday, 7 November 2012

Norman Kirk - In His Own Words

Working-Class Boy: In a vivid essay, bashed out on a typewriter in June 1972, Norman Kirk recalled his early life in the working-class Christchurch suburb of Linwood during the 1930s.

IN MY LAST POST I made reference to the passage David Grant
read out at The Kirk Legacy seminar. Composed by Norman Kirk himself it
astonished the audience not only with its content but also for its literary
quality. I have since discovered that Mr Grant gleaned this extraordinary
insight into “Big Norm’s” character and world-view from Margaret Hayward’s Diary of the Kirk Years. According to Ms
Hayward the piece had been typed out on “the other typewriter” in the Leader of
the Opposition’s office in June of 1972. “He didn’t stop to think or even
hesitate over a word. When he finished he glanced through the two pages of
typescript, altered a few words with his pen, handed it to me, said ‘That’s the
start of our book’ and went back to the House. A few days later Ms Hayward attempted
to return the typescript to her boss: “Today I tried to give it back to him but
he told me I must keep it. ‘Whatever happens, this is for you,’ he said.”

IT WAS A SHORT STREET.
Short and drab. There was no beauty. The corrugated ribs of the road stuck out
through its thin skin of stones. Weary rows of drooping poles clutched sagging
and fraying wires in blackened finger-tips. A sulking ooze lay in the bottom of
the gutters.

Smoke-grimed houses
stared vacantly through the half-shut eyes of drawn shades. Here and there a
small flower struggled for life, an abandoned orphan among the clods and weeds.

The footpaths were
never walked for pleasure. They led to school, to the shop; or for the lucky to
work. Only for children was the road a pleasure. They played there not because
they liked it, but because it was forbidden. It was not a bad street. It was
not a good street. It did not lead somewhere. It led nowhere.

It did not brood. It
had no character. Instead it conformed. The people were drab. The street was
drab. The people were poor. The street was poor. It was there because it had to
be. It had nowhere else to go. Neither did the people. It did not inspire. It
was a sponge. It soaked up hope. And at night it counted its people like a
warder counts his prisoners.

As a street it was not
exceptional. There were hundreds like it. They criss-crossed and cut into
unimaginative rectangles that filing cabinet of humanity – the working-class
suburb. Each street garnished with the name of a duke, a poet, a land
speculator of earlier times, a city father, a publican or some other nobility,
bestowed in a moment of parochial statesmanship by a body that found it easier
to name than number.

It was here in such
smothering, dulling and joyless circumstances the working men and their
families lived.

In these streets they
begat children, acquired mortgages, landlords, illnesses, fought among
themselves and with others, saw their children grow to be a mirror of
themselves, and then weary of it all slipped quietly away almost unnoticed.
They came into the world unknowing, when they went out they went unsung. When a
house was left empty it quickly filled. The names changed, the people remained
the same.

Sons followed their
fathers into industry. Daughters their mothers into matrimony. Their station in
life was preordained. Time passed in weeks. Monday was for washing. Friday was
pay-day – if you worked. Saturday afternoon was for the back garden or the pub.
Sunday was for silence – partly because the religious liked it that way, but
mainly because the thought of another week was enough to intimidate even the
hardiest soul.

2 comments:

Great writing, But i particularly liked this sentence. "They criss-crossed and cut into unimaginative rectangles that filing cabinet of humanity – the working-class suburb." It reminded me of this great Jimmy Reid speech: http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/man-is-a-social-being-real-fulfilment-for-any-person-lies-in-service-to-his-fellow-men-and-women-1.1047993